Dashboard

Links

The Status Dashboard provides links to all the main screens of the
browser user interface (BUI).

Over 100 visible items on the Dashboard link to associated BUI screens
indicated by a boarder or highlighted text that appears on mouse-over.

The sections that follow describe the areas of the Dashboard in detail.

Usage

The Usage area of the Dashboard provides a summary of your storage
pool and main memory usage. The pool name may be clicked
to change the pool which is displayed on the status screen, should
multiple pools be configured on the appliance.

Storage

The name of the pool appears at the top right of the
Usage area. To the left is a pie-chart of used and available
space. To go to the Shares screen for the pool, click the
Storage pie-chart.

Memory

To the left is a pie-chart showing memory usage by component. To
go to the Analytics worksheet for dynamic memory usage broken down by
application name, click the Memory pie-chart.

Summary Pool Usage

Used

Space used by this
pool including data and snapshots.

Avail

Amount of physical disk space available. Space
available for file data (as reported in the Shares screen) will be
less than this, due to the consumption of filesystem metadata.

Compression

Current compression ratio
achieved by this pool. Ratio will display 1x if compression is disabled.

Dedup

Current
data deduplication ratio achieved by this pool. Ratio will display 1x if
data deduplication is disabled.

Summary of main memory (RAM) usage

Cache

Bytes in use
by the filesystem cache to improve performance.

Unused

Bytes not currently in use.
After booting, this value will decrease as space is used by the
filesystem cache.

Mgmt

Bytes in use by the appliance management software.

Other

Bytes in use by
miscellaneous operating system software.

Kernel

Bytes in use by the operating system kernel.

Note that users need the analytics/component create+read authorization to view the memory usage.
Without this authorization, the memory details will not appear on the
Dashboard.

Services

This area of the Dashboard shows the status of services on the
appliance, with a light icon to show the state of each service.

Icons

Most services will be green indicating that the service is online, or
grey indicating that the service is disabled.

See the icon status section for a reference of all possible states and
icon colors.

Links

To go to the associated configuration screen, click on a service name.

The Properties screen appears with configurable fields, restart, enable, and disable icons,
and a link to the associated Logs screen for the service.

Hardware

This area of the Dashboard shows an overview of hardware on the
appliance.

Faults

If there is a known fault, the amber fault icon appears.

Links

To go to the Hardware Maintenance screen for a detailed look at hardware
state, click the name of a hardware component.

Activity

The activity area of the Dashboard shows graphs of eight performance statistics
by default. The example in this section shows Disk operations/sec. The statistical
average is plotted in blue and the maximum appears in light grey.

To go to the Analytics worksheet for an activity, click one of
the four graphs (day, hour, minute, second) for the statistic you want
to evaluate.

To view the average for each graph, mouse-over a graph and the
average appears in the tooltip. The weather icon in the upper-left provides
a report of activity according to thresholds you can customize for each
statistic on the Status Settings screen.

Graphs

Summary of Statistic Graphs

7 day graph
(7d)

A bar chart, with each bar representing one day.

24 hour graph
(24h)

A bar chart, with each bar representing one hour.

60 minute
graph (60m)

A line plot, representing activity over one hour (also visible as
the first one-hour bar in the 24 hour graph).

1 second graph

A line
plot, representing instantaneous activity reporting.

Average

The average for the selected plot is shown numerically above the graph.
To change the average that appears, select the average you want,
either 7d, 24h, or 60m.

Vertical Scale

The vertical scale of all graphs is printed on the top right,
and all graphs are scaled to this same height. The height
is calculated from the selected graph (plus a margin). The height will
rescale based on activity in the selected graph, with the exception of
utilization graphs which have a fixed height of 100%.

Since the height can rescale, 60 minutes of idle activity may look
similar to 60 minutes of busy activity. Always check the height
of the graphs before trying to interpret what they mean.

Understanding some statistics may not be obvious - you might wonder, for
a particular appliance in your environment, whether 1000 NFSv3 ops/sec is considered
busy or idle. This is where the 24 hour and 7 day
plots can help, to provide historic data next to the current activity
for comparison.

The plot height is calculated from the selected plot. By default, the
60-minute plot is selected. So, the height is the maximum activity during
that 60 minute interval (plus a margin). To rescale all plots to
span the highest activity during the previous 7 days, select 7d. This
makes it easy to see how current activity compares to the last
day or week.

Weather

The weather icon is intended to grab your attention when something is
unusually busy or idle. To go to the weather threshold configuration
page, click the weather icon. There is no good or bad threshold,
rather the BUI provides a gradient of levels for each activity statistic.
The statistics on which weather icons are based provide an approximate understanding
for appliance performance that you should customize to your workload, as follows:

Different environments have different acceptable levels for performance (latency), and so there is no one-size-fits-all threshold.

The statistics on the Dashboard are based on operations/sec and bytes/sec, so you should use Analytics worksheets for an accurate understanding of system performance.

Recent Alerts

This section shows the last four appliance alerts. Click the box
to go to the maintenance logs screen to examine all recent alerts in
detail.

CLI

A text version of the Status > Dashboard screen is available from
the CLI by typing status dashboard:

Tasks

Dashboard Tasks

Running the Dashboard Continuously

You might experience browser memory issues if you leave the Dashboard screen
open in a browser continuously (24x7). The browser will increase in size
(memory leaks), and need to be closed and reopened. Browsers are fairly
good at managing memory when browsing through different websites (and opening and
closing tabs); the issue is that the Dashboard screen is left running
and not closed, which opens and reopens images for the activity plots.

To reduce the browser memory growth (which will degrade image rendering performance),
disable the memory cache in Firefox, as follows: